Leonard Pitts: We Believe What We Want - Facts Be Damned

...are you guilty of double standards and outright bias?
I'll save you the trouble: Yes.

Maybe you already knew this intuitively. Now you can know it to a scientific certainty. Drew Westen ... a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta and author of a new and still-unpublished study test whether people make decisions based on bias or fact. Bias won hands down.

In a key scenario, respondents were led to believe a soldier was accused of torturing people at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The fictional soldier claimed to have been following orders from superiors who told him the Geneva Convention had been suspended. He supposedly wanted to subpoena President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to prove his case. Respondents were asked if he should have that right.

Some were presented with strong "evidence" corroborating the soldier's story. Others had only his word to go on.

But the strength or weakness of the evidence turned out to be immaterial. Researchers were able to predict people's opinion more than 80 percent of the time based simply on their opinions of the Bush administration, the GOP, the military and human rights groups. Those who had less affection for the president sided with the soldier even when the evidence was weak. And fans of the president tended to side with him even when the evidence was overwhelming.

We believe what we want, facts be damned.
<snip>
The full article is here. Read it.

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This article is particularly important to me, because it shows the ineffectiveness of the approach many people take on the Democratic Underground. Invective may make you feel good, but it doesn't work to change voters' minds. In fact, because it gets people's back up, it can often be counterproductive.

To argue effectively, you need to sound reasonable. You need to give weight to other people's feelings. If somebody likes Bush, you need to ask why, and when they tell you, gently, almost apologetically, point out facts that show that he hasn't really met those goals.

Or, if you prefer, you can keep attacking your fellow Democrats that don't scream loud enough for your taste, and remain happily frustrated at losing elections.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

may lie in an assumption that pro- and anti-Bush opinions exist in a vacuum. Did they either a)control for the possibility that, or b) test to see if, some of their reseatrch subjects had prior information about Abu Ghraib? Such knowledge might have already influenced people into an anti-Bush stance, or anti-Bush people may tend to have more knowledge of Abu Ghraib. These people would have been relatively impervious to information presented as part of the study because they already knew a lot about the issue, and had already made up their minds accordingly.

Disclaimers:
1) I haven't read this study.
2) I have had public arguments at national conferences with other Emory psych faculty whom I thought had done shoddy research (in an area unrelated to the present topic) because they failed to grasp the nature of the issue they were investigating.

Beyond the irrationality of arguments on the DU against either RWers or each other, this study, if supported by others, could help to change our current court system. How many attorneys use slandering evidence to bias a jury for or against a defendent? How often does the media circus bias public opinion for televised trials, as in the Petersen case?

We here at the DU, at least it seems, already know that people who are biased for Bush cannot be swayed even in the face of overwhelming evidence. This is obvious. We also seem to understand the fact that the media plays a powerful role in creating this bias.

It's an interesting study, but in understanding that facts cannot sway people's bias, I think most of us, me anyways, just let loose of our frustration and vent.

at least with the presentation of the study in the article (subject to the same sorts of caveats as jackpine radical, above).

The question is whether the respondant should have subpoena rights to prove his case.

I would bet that there are plenty of people who would say yes under both scenarios- based on notions of fundamental fairness under the law. Maybe not- but as has been mentioned, you can't really ask a question like that and make an association with attitudes toward Bush. My guess is that there's also a strong association between people who support Bush and people who could basically care less about due process. I suspect that there's also some percentage who might base a no answer on more complicated notions involving weighing executive privilige against subpoena power when there doesn't appear to be much anything more to support it than the defendant's word.

And those are just a few of the possible confounders.

Under this scenario, the conclusion that "we believe what we want, facts be damned," is (to say the least) a stretch- although for a good many people that may be true. Unfortunately, this study (as presented) provides pretty slender evidence for it.

???? and NO I WOULD NOT F***ING LIKE CLINTON IF HE HAD BEEN "LIKE BUSH" because unlike conservatives I PUT THE INTERESTS OF MY COUNTRY ABOVE THE INTERESTS OF MY PARTY. This article is INSULTING.

Jackpine Radical and depakid made excellent points. Foreknowledge of a specific issue like Abu Ghraib renders a hypothetical question largely invalid as a barometer of bias. I read the Leonard Pitts article and agree with much of what he says, but the example he cited falls far short of "scientific certainty."

CD, I also agree with you that "invective" can be counterproductive to efforts at getting Bush voters to change their minds. However, that is a different point than Pitts was making. He was referring to objectivity, not civil discourse. Certainly we need both, but the two are not mutually dependent. One can be biased and polite, or objectively informed and contemptuous.

We need to guard against letting our passions cloud our judgement or damage our political viability, but we also need to guard against compromising beliefs and objectives derived from facts and honest analysis. Your post -- combining the Pitts artcle with an appeal to "sound reasonable" -- sounds a bit like a DLC argument for moving to the right.